Spotted Alerts On Twitter

[zerotohundred]

Hey GuysnGals,

I will be working on putting together a new way of updating the Spotted thread using Twitter. I think it would be pretty cool if we could post a spot without having to wait till we get to a pc to post.

Just starting off at the moment, and im going to be working off/with Levi Buzolic's Proposed method:

Skylines Australia Twitter Spotted Alerts

The idea here is to allow skyline owners (members or otherwise) to post spotted threads in a more appropriate place (instead of clogging up the forums). A club twitter account (or possibly one account per state/state-club) will retweet the 'spots' so members can follow and be notified of all 'spots'. For demonstration purposes we'll call this account @skylinesspotted

The other major of this system (other than reducing the off-topic stuff in the forums) is that users will be able to post 'spots' from their phones. I find that when I see a skyline out on my daily drives that I'll forget to post it up in the spotted threads, or if I do remember; I'd forget what colour/number plate/time etc. Using twitter will allow people to post spots using older mobiles (via SMS) or on newer mobiles using Twitter apps or the website (iPhone, S60 Nokias, Android, WinMo).

Posting

Users will have two ways of posting a 'spot'.

1. If the user has twitter, they can DM or Reply to @skylinesspotted with their 'spot'.

2. For users that don't have twitter, or do not wish to use their twitter account, they can go to a web page and use a simple form to post a 'spot'.

People posting via twitter will have their usernames logged; any user found to be spamming/abusing the system will simply be added to an ignore list. The same goes for IP addresses fromt he web form - also a simple CAPTCHA will be used to prevent robots spamming the service.

Tagging

The system will look for common tags/words in all 'spots' - for example, it will recognise basic model numbers like 'R32' and keep stats on commonly used words. As each 'spot' is tagged with things like 'R33' and 'Black' users will be able to sue these tags/keywords to help find any spots of their own cars.

As it seems common for users to post in spotted threads with partial number plates like [1CQV-***] we could retrofit a system that will allow users to search for their number plate and all 'close' results will be listed.

Interstate/Inter-club Spotting

Because 'spots' are generally location specific - it'd make sense to provide a way for users to only follow local 'spots'. My proposal is to have a master twitter account like @skylinesspotted and then have state/club level accounts (ie. @sauwa, @saunsw, @sauqld etc.).

The master account will post all 'spots' from all states and will be the main database of spots that is used on the front end site. Users can either DM/Reply to their local club accounts or DM/Reply to the master account and tag their state/location. Any 'spot' tagged with 'WA' or sent directly to the @sauwa account will be reposted on both the master and @sauwa accounts. In the event a user doesn't tag their 'spot' with an appropriate location, the system will just repost on the master account.

We could easily look for major town names to determine which state/club the 'spot' should be posted to. For example any tweets marked with 'Perth' would be auto added to the 'WA' account.

Front End Website

The system will feature a simple front end website which will provide the tag searching abilities along with the form to post new 'spots'. Integrating things like TwitPic for people who post photos with their spots should be a simple task.

The system will look through each 'spot' and turn keywords/tags into links so they can be searched. So all instances of 'R32' would be a link, when clicked the user would be taken to a page with all 'spots' that have been marked with 'R32'.

Similarly, the site will display a little state icon next to each 'spot' for users to quickly and easily recognise where the 'spot' is relevant to.

Since Levi has already establised Anyone interested in seeing this happenning? insterested please Tweet @Sach33!

[zerotohundred]

UPDATE: Tweeps can now tag their tweets with #SpotSAU.

TODO: Get these tweets posted on the spotted thread under the member's username when